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Time to get our Side Quests rolling again, this time with a bit of a rant. ;)
This piece started life as a preview of 2006 - probably something like the 3-part series I wrote last year covering all the titles anticipated in 2005. As I began my basic research, it was obvious there were a handful of high-profile titles such as Oblivion, NWN2 and Gothic 3 that didn't need any more coverage, along with others such as The Witcher, Titan Quest, HoMM V, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and Hellgate London not far behind. There are also those games waiting for an official announcement or release date, like Divine Divinity 2 - but that's not much use for a 2006 roundup.
I decided to work on a more modest piece - something that highlighted the smaller projects that showed promise. Unfortunately, I couldn't find enough interesting second-tier titles to make the article worthwhile. Looking back at those titles I listed last year, a good half have yet to be released - with several apparently struggling to find a publisher or disappearing into ignominy without an English release.
Pretty disappointing.
As a niche market with complex development, we all know there will be relatively few AAA RPGs each year, and they will need to appeal to a broad market by carrying a well-known license and/or designing gameplay with appeal beyond the hardcore fans. Second-tier titles - those with less expensive development so they can be targeted at smaller markets - are more likely to address the hardcore market directly…except second-tier RPG development is essentially dead in North America - publishers just aren't interested.
All of which brings us to Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, where lower costs and the popularity of the PC foster a burgeoning number of second-tier RPGs. There's even room for things like turn-based games, sci-fi settings and space-based RPGs, which you'll never see out of North America without an "action" prefix.
As a substance-over-polish guy, I like a good number of "Euro RPGs" - warts and all. Nearly all of them are buggy and have obvious flaws but they often offer a unqiue experience on the other side of the equation - fans of Gothic or Divine Divinity will know what I mean. But it's such a shame these are the exceptions - that on the whole, a lot of potential goes to waste.
It's a pity - though not surprising - that developers with limited experience and even more limited funds make mistakes; polish is generally about time and money testing and refining - something these guys often don't have. For me, even more frustrating are the basic design "mistakes". Take Metalheart, for example. As a fan of Fallout I watched this one carefully, only to be very disappointed. It's when faced with the incredible number of bugs, dreadful writing and a diabolical translation that the underlying structural flaws - the ones you knew about all along - really leap to attention. How is it that a game aimed fair and square at Fallout fans, with a (superficially) similar setting, turn-based combat and 2D graphics that even look like Fallout at a glance, could use pre-designed characters? Isn't it obvious that fans of a game that provides one of the best character creation systems would look for that in a clone?
But an even bigger problem is English publishers. Numlock made any number of mistakes with Metalheart - but Dreamcatcher simply shovelled the mess into a box and shipped it. This isn't surprising when you consider the state of Dungeon Lords but it underlines the problem for RPG players - clearly the attitude is to turn enough sales for a profit from poor fools who don't know the rubbish they are buying. There are RPGs being developed in Europe and Russia with potential but English publishers largely aren't interested in developing that potential. In the main, North American publishers are apathetic about games with modest potential, which is why reasonably good games like Seal of Evil and Space Rangers 2 have only recently found publishers and others miss out altogether, although the more nimble UK market is a little more adventurous.
When English publishers do sign a Euro RPG, they are rarely prepared to spend a cent on it. I certainly understand the small profits with a niche game but in the scheme of game development, things like translations are relatively inexpensive. Failing to even attend to these simple things consigns many of these games to failure before they ever get released. If a small publisher were to carefully pick the best RPGs from Europe/Russia and spend just a little money on decent translations and QA, I believe there is a healthy hardcore player base ready to buy them. Imagine if a publisher had the courage to go a step further and actually assist these developers in addressing English markets (good user interfaces, anyone?) At the moment we have a self-fulfilling cycle: publishers treat players like chumps, pushing out sub-standard product, which doesn't sell - then point to the sales as proof the RPG market isn't worth investing in.
As always, comments are welcome. |
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Side Quest: Publishers score an 'F'
